by Lannie Stabile

If you want to be a good day, be Christmas two years ago. An
unseasonable 50 degrees. Not a wink of snow in sight. Big family
stuffed into too small living room. Eight folding chairs around a
six-foot card table. Bird picked over. Potatoes flaking. Gravy
graying in the old Country Crock container. A contractor bag of
discarded wrapping paper bulging by the front door, Mom’s
oxygen tank alive and hissing in the corner. But wait. Watch as
Mom unrolls her trove of one- and two-dollar lottery tickets with
an eyebrow wiggle. You gotta play to win, she tempts, pulling
Monopoly: Go from a Walmart shopping bag. An hour, several
scratching pennies, and a $10 dollar winner later, the pumpkin pie
is ready. The blue can of Reddi-wip passes from hand to hand.

Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry and a back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Lannie was also named a 2020 Best of the Net finalist. Her debut poetry full-length, Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, was published in 2021 by Cephalopress. Her fiction debut, Something Dead in Everything, is out now with ELJ Editions. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.